1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an anti-fraud credit card, and more particularly to such a credit card that is of the utmost simplicity, ease of use and minimum cost, while at the same time being highly effective in preventing misuse of the credit card.
The present invention relates to the manufacture of credit cards and the security of such cards until release to the end user.
The present invention relates to an improved credit card construction which is digitized finger print for facilitating identification and discouraging counterfeiting.
This invention relates to an improved credit card construction and, more particularly, to a credit card construction which includes a encoding mechanism that eliminates unauthorized use of the credit card.
The present invention relates to the detection of specified patterns within a given area and, more particularly, to a system for automatically providing an indication of the position and orientation of specified minutia in a fingerprint.
This invention relates to fingerprint comparison apparatus and, in particular, to a system using recycling FIFO buffer memories to perform parallel processing of a correlation algorithm to determine an "electronic" match between a portion of a reference fingerprint and a live fingerprint.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Increasing security problems are becoming a noticeable part of modern life, security was once primarily the preserve of classified government installations, but increasing losses and calamities have forces the review of security equipment and procedures by government and industry. Cargo losses and the theft of corporate secrets cost industry billions of dollars annually. Unauthorized access to computer data bases and other files are a major concern today and in the future. Public safety is endangered by the ability of intruders to plant bombs in places such as aircraft and buildings. Computerized records and even the computers themselves, are attacked and destroyed.
Access control and personnel identification are becoming tremendous problems, and will be the object of significant expenditures by organizations needing to identify employees, vendors, etc., who are to be allowed access to plants, computer rooms, vaults, baggage areas, etc. The ultimate method of personal identification s not a card which can be lost, loaned or stolen, nor a number code which can be told or purloined, but an unchangeable, non-transferable and indisputably unique characteristic of the person himself, his fingerprint.
With crime in the United States and elsewhere on the upswing and with the relative supply of trained law enforcement personnel on the decline, the law enforcement community has been forced, in recent years, to investigate and consider the automatic processing of the large amounts of data it is required to maintain. One area of recent interest has been in the automatic processing of fingerprints. A few facts will serve to indicate why this is the case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a fingerprint file which consists of over 182,000,000 fingerprint cards, each having 10 prints thereon. There are some 13,000 agencies throughout the world contributing fingerprint cards to the FBI and the FBI receives over 27,500 inquiries per day. In its Washington offices alone, the FBI has over 1000 people whose task it is to search and classify fingerprint cards. The California Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has a file consisting of approximately 5,500,000 fingerprint cards and receives in excess of 95,000 inquiries per month. The New York State Identification and Intelligence System has a file in excess of 1,300,000 fingerprint cards and receives more than 200,000 inquiries per year. These figures along serve to indicate the enormity of the task of reading and classifying fingerprints for the purposes of identification and matching.
Other areas would benefit from a device for automatically reading fingerprints. For example, the economy of the United States today is based on the credit system and the use of credit cards. However, millions of dollars are lost annually because of the use of lost or stolen credit cards. With an automatic fingerprint reader and correlator, much of this could be eliminated. Each credit card could be made so that upon insertion into a machine, a central storage file would automatically locate the file of the credit cared owner which would include his or her fingerprint records. Then, by merely placing the credit card holder's finger on a glass or the like, an automatic reader could read the fingerprint and provide the information to a correlation system which would determine whether the fingerprint of the credit card holder matches those in the file of the credit card owner. With automatic reading and correlating apparatus, this could be done in a matter of seconds.
Because of the importance of this problem, many suggestions have been made in recent years for automatic fingerprint readers and recorders. Many of the proposed systems operate to locate fingerprint minutiae, such as ridge endings or bifurcations, since the use of fingerprint minutiae as a means of positive, legal identification has been proven in practice. Therefore, since the automatic detection of specified minutiae is basically a problem in pattern recognition, it would appear to be a simple matter to provide an automatic system of the detection of such minutiae. However, the recognition of these minutiae is complicated by several factors, such as: (1) the specified minutiae occur at arbitrary orientations; (2) there are variations in ridge breadth and distance between ridge centers; (3) there are various inherent defects in all fingerprints, such as scars, warts, etc.; (4) false ridge endings appear at the boundaries of fingerprints and scars; and (5) the quality of fingerprints varies widely with respect to contrast and clarity. As a result, in almost all cases, the proposed system has either been too complex, too inefficient or inoperative.
For example, it has been proposed to use a large scale computer to control the scan of a fingerprint along some predetermined pattern and so store the resulting complex electrical signal. Subsequently, in order to identify a fingerprint, it will have to be scanned and the resultant complex electrical signal compared with those in the memory banks of the computer. Although this approach may well be operative, it has the inherent disadvantage of all mass data-processing systems, and that is the requirement for enormous amounts of complex and costly equipment.
Another suggested approach has been to use holographic techniques whereby two fingerprints may be matched or the location of specified minutiae on fingerprints identified by simultaneously illuminating an unknown fingerprint and a known mask with coherent laser light and determining the locations of a match. However, apparently because of the complexity and the minute detail present in typical fingerprints, it has not been possible to make such a system which operates reliably.
The American economy, over the years in the 20th Century, has slowly but surely changed into an economy centered on credit. As a business man travels from his banks to department stores to gas stations to restaurants, the credit card that is acceptable at each one of those institutions is different in most cases from the other cards that he must carry. As a business person travels throughout this country, from state to state, or throughout the world, from country to country, he or she is more and more burdened by the large number of various types and styles of credit cards that he must carry with him.
It is known to carry credit cards that are backed by large banking organizations. Cards such as a Visa or MasterCard are but two of the examples of this modern form of credit card. Although these cards are useful in a wide variety of situations, for example purchasing goods at a store or lodging at a hotel or inn, it is not uncommon for a single individual to have three or four of each of these types, each being issued by a different bank.
Another problem that may exist is when a card is first issued, a small figure, for example $500 or $600, is established as a line of credit. However, as time proceeds and the individual proves to be a good credit risk, that line of credit is expanded to an amount $2,000 to $5,000. It is very often difficult, when one person has four or five Visas or MasterCards, for that person to remember what credit limit applies to which card. More times than not, for a particularly large purchase, an individual might at first try to use a card that does not have sufficient credit on it, to the embarrassment of the card holder, even though he does have two or three other cards that do have sufficient credit on them.
Even though a person can get a bank credit card, this does not preclude the use of three or four cards from typically local establishments. While in the most part these establishments are department stores, and usually very large department stores at that, they are regional in their use. Therefore, a person traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast would find that he or she could no longer make purchases in a well-known department store on the West Coast because his credit reputation is known only to the East Coast department stores.
Plastic cards have gained great popularity in recent years as a medium by which purchase money is paid and business transacted without the necessity of carrying cash or enduring a long term escrow or other means for transferring title or securing payment of cash. With the popularity and ready acceptance of credit cards in the business world, the use thereof by unscrupulous persons to make unauthorized transaction has become a serious problem costing the consumers millions of dollars annually. As the demand for such cards has risen amongst counterfeiters and other illegal uses, the demand for improperly obtained cards market has skyrocketed thus creating an extremely high incentive for dishonest employees connected with the manufacture of such cards to succumb to temptation. Such employees are presented daily with a temptation to supply cards to persons bent on improper use thereof, all for great sums of money.
There have been many efforts in the past to assure the security of credit cards, including coding thereof for check at the point of purchase to determine if the card may be a stolen card. Other efforts have led to the construction of credit cards with a hologram strip secured to the face thereof and incorporating optical images characteristic of the particular card such that a merchant or other person to whom the card is presented will have an opportunity to examine the card to determine if the hologram is in position and to identify the characteristics of the images incorporated therein.
While many efforts have been made to provide security against illegitimate use of stolen credit cards, little effort has been made, and even less success achieved, to provide security at the place of manufacture and storage of such cards prior to distribution to the end user. Consequently, there exists a need for a method of manufacture and a credit card which discourages theft by employees yielding to the temptation to supply such cards to others or to use the cards themselves for illegitimate purposes.
By way of background, counterfeiting of credit cards at the present time is relatively easy and can be accomplished effectively by unsophisticated counterfeiters. In this respect, the ordinary credit card is fabricated from a 20 mil core layer of polyvinyl chloride which is printed to provide information on the front and rear of the card. Laminated to each of these layers is a 5 mil clear polyvinyl chloride sheet through which the printing can be seen. The total thickness of the card is 30 mils and it can be fabricated by the use of commercially available material. Thus, counterfeiters can obtain the basic materials for making a credit card from normal commercial channels, and with a minimum of equipment, may duplicate credit cards. It is with overcoming the foregoing ease of counterfeiting that the present invention is concerned.
A search hereon has revealed the following U.S. Pat. Nos.:
______________________________________ Pat. No. Issued Inventor(s) ______________________________________ 3,399,473 September 3, 1968 Jaffe 3,624,938 December 7, 1971 Richard 3,787,839 January 22, 1974 Fayling 4,109,689 July 18, 1978 Broune 4,432,567 February 21, 1984 Stockburger ______________________________________
Jaffe '473 relates to a combination credit card and is really just an electric switch. Richard '938 relates to a foolproof credit card and, like Jaffe '473, is really just an electric switch. Fayling '839 relates to a magnetic viewer device having movable anisotropic elements. It is complicated to manufacture and assemble, bulky and costly, and may not be altogether reliable. Broune '689 relates to a transaction card, having permanent indicia for designating an authorized user of the card. One or more rotatable discs with coded indicia thereon may be viewed through a window to complete a coded designation of authorized use. The Broune device is easy to make and low in cost, but the code must be previously known to restaurants, hotels, and so forth. Furthermore, Broune is not concerned and does not deal with magnetic stripes. Stockburger et al. '567 relates to an authorization card with one or more storing zones for storing information defining the extent of authorization, for example credit information in the case of a credit card. The card is complicated to make and use by a card owner. These prior patents are believed to be irrelevant to the patentability of the present invention.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,762,081 issued Oct. 2, 1973, to Armbruster et al. for a Credit Card, there is disclosed a credit card construction which utilizes slots and mechanically movable members or tabs positioned in said slots. The members are movable to any one of a plurality of defined, index positions. In order to use the credit card, the movable members must be set in appropriate positions. The card is then "read" by identification apparatus such as a cash register computer billing terminal. When not in use the tabs are displaced from the correct "combination" positions.
The prior art credit card construction described, while providing a good means to prevent unauthorized use of a credit card, has the disadvantage of not being compatible with many credit card systems. Moreover, a complex combination of numbers may necessarily need to be committed to memory. This would be a burdensome task for the credit card user in the event he owns a number of such cards. The present invention contemplates an improvement over the prior art structure utilizing some of the basic principles associated with the prior art structure.
Important objects of the present invention are to provide an antifraud credit card that is of the utmost simplicity and ease of use and minimum cost while at the same time is highly effective in preventing misuse of the credit card. The manner in which the invention attains these objects of the invention will become apparent hereinafter.
Numerous innovations for an digitized finger print credit card have been provided in the prior art that are described as follows. Even though these innovations may be suitable for the specific individual purposes to which they address, they differ from the present invention as hereinafter contrasted.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,050,711 to Harmon uses a cathode ray scanner but places transducer elements about a plurality of circles. The result is that it is impossible with this approach to obtain scans of sufficiently small orbits at any one location of his transducer to effect character recognition of the type needed in fingerprint analysis. When it is considered that the diameter of a cathode ray beam is in the order of 0.001 inches, it can be understood why it is impossible to evaluate light and dark spots at any one location of the transducers used herein due to the practical dimension of the transducer itself being larger than the details of recognition required within the confines of any one transducer area.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,112,468 to Kamentsky shows a character recognition device, but the polar scan taken herein is an overall polar scan of the entire character or pattern. This art does not have embodied therein means for sequentially positioning the beam of the cathode ray spot scanner at coordinate locations along rectilinear axes including means for sequentially scanning the pattern at each of the coordinate locations with a plurality of scans wherein each of the scans are a plurality of successive polar scans having polar radii of different magnitudes for scanning a plurality of portions of each of the coordinate locations, which are needed to obtain the high resolution requirements of a fingerprint analysis or minutia device.
U.S. Patent No. Sprick, although this is in character analysis field, is inadequate for fingerprint analysis requirements. It does not teach storing digital data for each point of each polar scan at each XY coordinate position and fails with respect to the need for providing means for sequentially comparing digital data for detecting a predetermined relationship between corresponding points of each polar scan. Further, this patent does not provide means for determining the angular orientation of a predetermined pattern relationship relative to a normal axis.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,370,271 to Van Dalen, U.S. Pat. No. 3,293,604 to Klein, U.S. Pat. No. 3,234,513 to Brust, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,496,541 to Haxby, appear to teach variations of linear scanning systems. A linear scanning system exclusively is not adequate for fingerprint analysis, it requires a sequence of ever diminishing areas of polar scans.